UMass Monkey Torment Put on Blast by PETA, Local Animal Rights Group
For Immediate Release:
February 1, 2024
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Students returning to the University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) campus for the start of the spring semester will be doing a double-take as a mobile billboard—courtesy of PETA—circles the campus today broadcasting video footage of monkeys imprisoned in experimenter Agnès Lacreuse’s laboratory, where marmosets are tormented and killed to study menopause, which they don’t even experience.
This will be followed on Monday by a campus protest led by Western Mass. Animal Rights Advocates to call out Lacreuse’s deadly experiments. The protest will take place from 12 noon to 2 p.m. at the UMass Student Union, 280 Hicks Way.
“Lacreuse’s laboratory is more about making animals suffer than helping humans,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Katherine Roe. “UMass should shut it down now and fund meaningful human-relevant, animal-free research.”
In useless experiments that have already cost taxpayers more than $5 million, Lacreuse surgically removes marmosets’ reproductive organs, screws electrodes into their skulls, and heats their tiny bodies with hand warmers. Once she’s done, she kills them and dissects their brains. This is all to induce symptoms of menopause, which they don’t naturally experience. Lacreuse is now trying to blast the tiny monkeys awake repeatedly with loud noises throughout the night, supposedly to learn about age-related cognitive decline in humans.
The laboratory’s history of animal welfare violations includes severely burning a marmoset with hand warmers as he was recovering from surgery, failing to alert an attending veterinarian to sick animals, and permitting a monkey to escape and injuring their tail during recapture.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.
